WooCommerce and Gutenberg Editor: Experiments for Compatibility Check

How will Gutenberg impact the WooCommerce in the long run? Is Gutenberg editor beneficial for WooCommerce? Is it even compatible with WooCommerce or not? If these things interest you, you must read this post.

WordPress lovers will be familiar with the introduction of Gutenberg editor in the upcoming WordPress (5.0) release. The all new WordPress Gutenberg editor is committed to revolutionizing the content creation. It will give better user experience with “content-blocks”. The block-editing will enable WordPress to add content layouts. And give users a full WYSIWYG experience. For more details, you can read the article on Gutenberg Editor.

But WooCommerce is a lot more than post/page content. So, the developers start discovering ahead that how the products will interact with Gutenberg. How will the WordPress Gutenberg editor handle e-commerce? How will the WooCommerce Gutenberg combination emerge out?

Exploring Gutenberg Editor for WooCommerce

Dealing with posts, pages, videos and other fundamental content types is one thing. While to have an authoring experience with products is all different. The WooCommerce team moved a step forward. They conduct some experiments to see WooCommerce Gutenberg changes. They named these experiments as “Wootenberg Experiments”.

Wootenberg Experiments

These are the initiative to find that how flexible is the use of Gutenberg for product page layout. Will it be a new authoring experience for the WooCommerce users? Gutenberg appears to be an emerging opportunity in this direction. So, let’s see what the current experiments show about the product creation UI.

The WooCommerce team has tried to add new Product blocks to the posts and pages. They created blocks of featured products, recent products etc. But it was totally different from authoring a blog post. You can load images of different products and then set different properties. Such as the number of products get displayed per row, number of product rows per page etc. Hopefully, the Gutenberg will successfully mimic the rich authoring experience for products also.

Gutenberg Templates

A lot of curiosity has already built over the news of the themes defining Gutenberg Templates. These can be assumed as predefined sets of configurations that speed ups the post creation. Imagine a product block with a Gutenberg product template. It will help to display all the details of a product in new Gutenberg blocks like Product Title, Description, Price, Featured Image etc. You will fill the blanks only as the template will manage the rest. It can also privilege users to specify block template. Seems exciting !!

Future of Gutenberg with Complex Products

All seems to be simple and manageable as long as products are simple. If the product demands to specify image, title, description, price, then it’s manageable. But if the product is complex, means involves variations and all that need to upload new images each time, then, managing the related data will be tougher. But handling the complex product data using Gutenberg in WooCommerce is still unclear. How will Gutenberg edit this data – is still a mystery!

But as the investigation and experimentation have started at the WooCommerce end, I hope the new WooCommerce Gutenberg changes will be worthy as desired.

Roadmap of WooCommerce wrt Gutenberg

The next common question arises about WooCommerce Gutenberg compatibility. Will the Gutenberg editor be compatible with WooCommerce? How will it handle the different product options? All these things are looking to be answered with the new version of WooCommerce. Its final release is planned for 2018. It will provide a single shortcode for many product options. It will also integrate the new Gutenberg editor.

What you say….

All are eager to see how Gutenberg stirs the WordPress theme landscape. How WooCommerce makes use of Gutenberg? How does the Gutenberg editor impact WooCommerce and so on?

Although developers are continuously working on it, things are far away. A lot of work needs to be done before the final release of Gutenberg Editor and the journey looks hard but promising !!

What do you think about this? Will the Gutenberg editor be flexible enough to incorporate products? Does it look possible to have a smooth authoring experience for products through Gutenberg? I am really fascinated by thinking all about this.

What are your concerns? What do you think about the future of the duo WooCommerce and Gutenberg? And, what you feel about the Gutenberg, its effect on WooCommerce, please share. Your opinion is valuable to us.

About Deepak Singla

Deepak Singla, the backbone of Template Toaster, having expertise in Web Designing and Development. He is a knowledge enthusiast and a devoted content creator, possessing 6 years of web-related experience.